Over recent times, there has been an amazing growth in the number of social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and there has been an explosion in the number of users of these social networking sites. Each day there is a huge amount of information being stored in these sites, and much of it is made available by users for sharing.
Even with the rapidly increasing number of social networking sites, there has yet to emerge any standardized manner to communicate between these sites. Generally, social networking sites have relied on their own proprietary techniques for interacting with users and for performing their various corresponding social networking site actions (e.g., check status, write on a wall, etc.).
As a consequence, the various social networks are isolated from each other even while they may each provide services to the same user. Even though there is a large following of users in each social networking site who would benefit from a seamless exchange of information between these networks, there has emerged no clear integration platform for information exchange between social networks. Moreover, even though users wish to ease the burden of coordinating posts and other activities between multiple social networking sites, and even though there is a great deal of synergy that can accrue to the process of collecting and analyzing cross-site user data (or metadata), the cost of collecting and analyzing cross-site user data remains prohibitive for all except the most important and/or lucrative endeavors.
A “Tower of Babel” scenario becomes apparent when assessing the myriad access techniques used by each social networking site. Building point-to-point software integrations between applications and individual social networking sites is expensive. Worse, maintaining cross-site integrations based on point-to-point access and integration techniques sets up a never-ending need for development of ever more of these point-to-point integrations as new social networking sites emerge.
What is needed is an environment that facilitates ease of building and scaling applications (e.g., business applications) that can communicate between social networks.
None of the aforementioned point-to-point or other legacy approaches achieves the capabilities of the herein-disclosed configurable platform for processing social networking site events across multiple social networking nodes. Therefore, there is a need for improvements.